The Rosetta Stone - Exhibit in London The Rosetta Stone "You mean the original translation "hardware" right?"(2 Tips) "The British Museum is a great place...."(2 Tips) 6 Tips and reviews Log in to leave a tip here. Post Guillermo Carrera January 18, 2016 The British Museum is a great place.... You will need more than one day to see all the exhibitions Anna Chuchmek November 15, 2015 Cannot appreciate it as much as i'm supposed Alexandre Curiel October 18, 2015 Main exhibit of the British Museum! Loads of people around B M April 25, 2015 Merci mister Champollion Rob C September 14, 2013 Err. You mean the original translation "hardware" right? 😜 Bob Gibson July 22, 2013 The original translation software!

Rosetta Stone found - Jul 19, 1799 - HISTORY.com Rosetta Stone found Publisher A+E Networks On this day in 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years. When Napoleon, an emperor known for his enlightened view of education, art and culture, invaded Egypt in 1798, he took along a group of scholars and told them to seize all important cultural artifacts for France.

Pierre Bouchard, one of Napoleon’s soldiers, was aware of this order when he found the basalt stone, which was almost four feet long and two-and-a-half feet wide, at a fort near Rosetta. When the British defeated Napoleon in 1801, they took possession of the Rosetta Stone. Several scholars, including Englishman Thomas Young made progress with the initial hieroglyphics analysis of the Rosetta Stone. French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), who had taught himself ancient languages, ultimately cracked the code and deciphered the hieroglyphics using his knowledge of Greek as a guide. Hieroglyphics used pictures to represent objects, sounds and groups of sounds. Once the Rosetta Stone inscriptions were translated, the language and culture of ancient Egypt was suddenly open to scientists as never before. The Rosetta Stone has been housed at the British Museum in London since 1802, except for a brief period during World War I. At that time, museum officials moved it to a separate underground location, along with other irreplaceable items from the museum’s collection, to protect it from the threat of bombs.

Related Videos The Rosetta Stone, British Museum, London - Travel To Eat Travel To Eat The Rosetta Stone, British Museum, London The Rosetta Stone, British Museum, London The Rosetta Stone is a very famous historical artifact, almost everyone has heard of it and most people know it has something to do with language. It is a black basalt slab that provided scholars with their first key to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Prior to this point Egyptian hieroglyphics were considered to be a pictorial form of writing without a real grammar and the Egyptians were considered by the English to be a backward people. Using the Rosetta Stone as a dictionary, scholars were able to translate other inscriptions and manuscripts written in hieroglyphics opening up three thousand years of remarkable Egyptian history. The stone was discovered in 1799 near el-Rashid, known as Rosetta in Egypt, by a French engineer of Napoleon's army, Captain François-Xavier Bouchard, built into the wall of an ancient Arab fort (Fort St Julien) which he'd been assigned to tear down.

Description de l'Égypte The ill-fated French expeditionary force that occupied Egypt under Napoleon's command from July 1798 until 1801 ( see my post ) included over 100 of France's leading scientists. While in Egypt, the scientists recorded investigations on natural history, archaeology, physical geography, technology, weights and measures, hydrography, meteorology, chemistry, medicine, and other aspects of Egyptian culture and environment. The great monuments were examined and the science of Egyptology was founded. One of the most important discoveries in that field was the Rosetta Stone. Their work was published on returning to France as the “Description de l'Égypte“, in many volumes of truly monumental dimensions, with beautiful engraved plates. The Rosetta Stone came to London and to the British Museum (where it remains) in 1802, after the French surrender to the British forces in Egypt in 1801. Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek Text of the Rosetta Stone, British Museum, London The stone fragment carried three parallel inscriptions. One, in Greek, identified the passage as a decree issued by Ptolemy V in 196 B.C.

The other two, written in Egyptian hieroglyphics and demotic (simplified hieroglyphic) scripts, both indecipherable at the time, appeared from their nearly equal lengths to represent translated versions of the Greek text. The Greek text was fairly easy to read, if a little boring. It is a decree prepared in 196 B.C. by a group of priests ordering the commemoration of the first anniversary of the coronation of their pharaoh, Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The priests praised the pharaoh for many laudable deeds, such as canceling overdue taxes and granting amnesty to prisoners. In closing, the decree directed that it be inscribed in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek on stone slabs. The stele is a late example of a class of donation stelae, which depicts the reigning monarch granting a tax exemption to the resident priesthood. Pharaohs had erected these stelae over the previous 2,000 years, the earliest examples dating from the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Alexander the Great, Ptolemy I and Ptolemy V, British Museum and Louvre In 332 BC, Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great.

After Alexander's death, his former general Ptolemy I ruled Egypt. His Greek descendents known as the Ptolemies ruled Egypt for the next 300 years. The Ptolemaic period witnessed a fusion of Greek and Egyptian cultures. Greek was the official language of the court, while hieroglyphs were limited to use by the priests. Demotic Egyptian was the native script used for everyday purposes that evolved from Hieroglyphs dating from about 643 B.C. Hieroglyphic writing died out in Egypt in the fourth century AD. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in the year 391 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I. Coptic Text with Arabic Translation Verses Rosetta Stone The ancient scripts were replaced with 'Coptic', a script consisting of 24 letters from the Greek alphabet supplemented by six demotic characters used for Egyptian sounds not expressed in Greek. The ancient Egyptian language continued to be spoken, and evolved into what became known as the Coptic language, but in due course both the Coptic language and script were displaced by the spread of Arabic in the 11th century.

The final linguistic link to Egypt's ancient kingdoms was then broken, and the knowledge needed to read the history of the pharaohs was lost. This understanding of the continuity of the language culture of Egypt through millennia was the correct hypotheses of Jean-François Champollion. By 1821, he had come to the conclusion that that “the hieratic (demotic) “is nothing but a simplification of hieroglyphic,” and that it “should be considered as shorthand for the hieroglyphs.” Interestingly, in 2012, the University of Chicago just finished a 40 years project to update and supplement a more modest glossary of Demotic words published in German in 1954 by Wolja Erichsen, a Danish scholar. It is called the Chicago Demotic Dictionary, available online. Hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone The discovery of the Stone was not made public until September 1799, in an article printed in the Courrier de l'Egypte. It was shipped to Cairo in mid-August, and became an object of study at the Institute.

Jean-Joseph Marcel and Remi Raige were able to identify the unknown cursive script, Demotic, but they were unable to read it. Copies of the scripts were made by the lithographers Marcel and A. Galland, who covered the Stone's surface with printer's ink, layed sheets of paper over it and used rollers to obtain an impression. Several sheets were sent to scholars throughout Europe, and two copies were presented to citizen Du Theil of the Institute Nationale de Paris by General Charles-François-Joseph Dugua (former Commandant of Cairo) on his return from Egypt. A French translation of the text was made by Du Theil, revealing that the Stone “was a monument to the gratitude of some priests of Alexandria, or some neighboring place, towards Ptolemy Epiphanes.” The Ptolemy Cartouche on the Rosettta Stone The hieroglyphs proved most difficult to read, because of the false assumption that hieroglyphs were only symbols for words and did not represent sounds. Georges Zoega had deduced in the 18th century, that proper names could be isolated, because they were contained in cartouches, or oval-shaped enclosures.

An English scholar, Thomas Young, made some progress in identifying some of the proper names, such as Ptolemy, in the demotic and hieroglyphic texts in 1819. Young called his achievements “the amusement of a few leisure hours.” He lost interest in hieroglyphics, and brought his work to a conclusion by summarizing it in an article for the 1819 supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 1822 a French scholar, Jean-Francois Champollion, drawing upon his knowledge of the ancient Coptic language of Egypt, correctly determined that the hieroglyphs represented both sounds and words, thus finding the key to the translation of hieroglyphics. Champollion’s Decription of the Ptolemy and Cleopatra Cartouche Cleopatra Cartouche on the Philae Obelisk Champollion’s work on deciphering hieroglyphics was a life-long occupation. Ptolemy was the only name on the Rosetta Stone.

Champollion, in 1822, saw copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions of the Philae Obelisk, on which William John Bankes had tentatively noted the names “Ptolemaios” and “Kleopatra” (????????? in Greek) in both languages. The obelisk was said to have been fixed in a socket, bearing a Greek inscription containing a petition of the priests of Isis at Philae, addressed to Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his wife. There were several corresponding letters, indicated in green above (P, O, L and E). Also there were two letters or sounds indicated as the same, the letter “A”, indicated by the yellow arrow. The letter “T”, indicated by the red arrow, is not the same being represented by a half circle above and an outstretched hand below. Here, he assumed that this must also represent T, and assumed the notion of homophones: that more than one symbol or character could be used to express the same sound (as in English “phonetic” and “fancy”).

He went on to decipher reproductions in the third volume of the “Description de l'Égypte”, which showed inscriptions of other Greek and Roman leaders. Finally he tackled the cartouche of Ramses which he finally solved. Précis du Système Hieroglyphiques des Anciens Egyptiens 1824, Jean-Francois Champollion The complete elaboration of Champollion’s discovery came in his 1824 masterpiece, the “Précis du Système Hieroglyphiques des Anciens Egyptiens”. As he stated at the outset, he would show that the alphabet he had established, applied to “all epochs,” and that his discovery of the phonetical values unlocked the entire system. Simplified Hieroglyphic Alphabet The Egyptian language was made up of sounds. Partly of vowels and consonants, however; hieroglyphs constantly ignored and left out vowels. How a word sounds in hieroglyphics is more important than how it is spelled. Hieroglyphs are also pictures. These signs had no order to how they were written. They could be written from left to right, right to left, or reading downwards, vertically.

In viewing the pictures to decide which way it is read, look at the faces of men or animals. If the face is facing left, then the inscriptions is read from left to right. If the faces are facing right, then it is read right to left. In addition the symbols were crammed into the cartouche with no particular attention to the size of the consonant. The system of writing (and reading) hieroglyphs was intensely complex and very labor intensive. Reading hieroglyphics reminds me a lot of the game “Pictionary” but in Coptic. I am going to stop here, if you are really interested, please visit the links below. References: There is an Ipad App: Egyptian Hieroglyphs which I used to make the figures How Champollion Deciphered the Rosetta Stone: Napoleon and the Scientific Expedition to Egypt: Visit the British Museum and see the Rosetta Stone | VisitEngland Read more … Close × The Rosetta Stone was found near the Egyptian village of el-Rashid (or Rosetta) around 196 BC. Today the stone, part of a larger slab, lies in Room 4 at the British Museum.

Peer closely and you'll see the inscription carved on its surface in three different scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek), which was vital in helping experts decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs – knowledge of which had been lost. The message on the stone is a decree affirming the support of priests from a temple in Memphis, Egypt, for King Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. It would have been one of a series of stone copies made to put in every temple in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone is just one of many truly exceptional objects on display at the British Museum. Other highlights include the ancient Greek Parthenon sculptures, the Mummy of Katebet and the huge Easter Island statue. Content provided by Visitlondon.com / London & Partners The Discovery of the Rosetta Stone The Discovery of the Rosetta Stone An Oriental Expedition Bonaparte returned to Paris in December 1797 following his successful first Italian campaign and the Peace of Campo Formio as a public hero. He received many distinctions, one of which was his election to the National Institute, an exclusive body of scientists and men of letters. In this unstable period, the Directory employed Bonaparte in a plan to make a direct invasion of England.

After a review of these plans, he suggested that an effort be made against her possessions in India might be more successful than a channel crossing. Plans were drawn up to capture Malta and then Egypt in the hopes that the latter occupation would give France control of the lucrative trade routes to the east. The Directory also instructed Bonaparte to build a canal through the Isthmus of Suez and improve the situation of the local population. As Egypt was a nominal Turkish possession, foreign minister Talleyrand was to be sent to Constantinople to explain French plans, but in the end he never met with the Sultan. Swiss gold helped finance the enterprise. Twenty-one demi-brigades marched toward the ports of Toulon, Marseilles, Genoa, Ajaccio, and Civita Vecchia. Admiral Brueys would command the fleet of 300 ships, and Bonaparte would lead the expedition.

In keeping with France's hopes to advance the ideals of the revolution, bring prosperity to Egypt (for their own gain as well as the population's), and unlock the secrets of that ancient land, a large number of civilians would also take part, including many men of letters and science, carefully selected by Bonaparte, General Cafarelli, and the scientist Berthollet. They set sail on 19 April 1798. The convoy eluded the Royal Navy, took possession of Malta, continued on and made a landing at Marabout (just west of Alexandria) on 1 July. Arrival in Egypt The French occupied Alexandria on 2 July. Murad Bey, the Mameluke leader and governor of Egypt, fought and lost to the French at the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July, and Bonaparte entered the capital of Egypt on 24 July 1798. The Institute of Egypt was established on August 22, organizing the scholars, and was divided into four sections: Mathematics, Physics, Political Economy, and Literature and Arts, headed by Gaspard Monge. There were many improvements made. Hospitals were established in Alexandria, Cairo, Damietta and Rosetta.

Disease was studied, and sanitary regulations and quarantines reduced epidemics. Streetlights were installed on the main thoroughfares of Cairo. Citizens were disarmed. Taxation was reorganized. Two printing plants had been brought from France and the first book was printed in Egypt: Exercises In Literary Arabic Extracted From The Koran, For The Use Of Those Who Are Studying That Language. A private printer established a weekly newspaper: Le Courrier de l'Egypte, and the literary and scientific journal of the Institute: La Décade Égyptienne came into being. Studies were made of zoology, botany and agriculture. The results of these labors were eventually collected in a twenty-four volume work: Description de l'Egypte published between 1809 and 1828. Discovery of the Stone Rosetta Stone Two particular areas of study resulted in significant and long-lasting discoveries or achievements. The savants traveled with the army and the geography was charted and a map of Egypt was drawn (completed in 1806) that remained classified until the end of Napoleon's reign. The great monuments were examined and the science of Egyptology was founded.

One of the most important discoveries in that field was the Rosetta Stone. The Stone is a block of basalt with engravings made on its polished surface. It was named after the village where it was found, Rashid (known as Rosetta to Europeans) located a few miles from the sea in the western delta of the Nile. It measures 3'9" (114 cm) in height, 2'4-1/2" (72cm) in width and 11" (28cm) in thickness. It weighs just under a ton (762kg). It is somewhat damaged, missing a large part of the upper left-hand corner, and a smaller part of its lower right corner. The chiseled inscriptions are in two languages, Greek and Egyptian, but three scripts. The first of the Egyptian scripts is Hieroglyphs, used 3,000 years ago at the time of the First Dynasty. The second was later determined to be Demotic, a cursive language that evolved from Hieroglyphs and dating from 643 B.C. The Stone was discovered in mid-July 1799, but the circumstances are unclear.

Some say it was found just lying on the ground. Others claim that it was part of an old wall which was ordered demolished by French soldiers in order to extend Fort Julien. This claim is supported by the Institute's Egyptian map which indicates the fort being on the west bank of the Nile in the area of Rosetta. The Stone was discovered by Captain (or Lieutenant, sources differ) of Engineers, Pierre François Xavier Bouchard, who headed the demolition team. Scholars immediately recognized that this stone contained the key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian language. This was because it appeared that the Stone's message was repeated in the three scripts, and because Greek could be read, over time it might be used to decipher the other two. General Jacques-François Menou, military governor of Rosetta, quickly arranged to have the Greek characters translated in order to determine the nature of the text. The discovery of the Stone was not made public until September 1799, in an article printed in the Courrier de l'Egypte. It was shipped to Cairo in mid-August, and became an object of study at the Institute.

Jean-Joseph Marcel and Remi Raige were able to identify the unknown cursive script, Demotic, but they were unable to read it. Copies of the scripts were made by the lithographers Marcel and A. Galland, who covered the Stone's surface with printer's ink and lay sheets of paper over it and used rollers to obtain an impression. Several sheets were sent to scholars throughout Europe, and two copies were presented to citizen Du Theil of the Institute Nationale de Paris by General Charles-François-Joseph Dugua (former Commandant of Cairo) on his return from Egypt. A French translation of the text was made by Du Theil, revealing that the Stone "was a monument to the gratitude of some priests of Alexandria, or some neighboring place, towards Ptolemy Epiphanes." A Latin translation was made in 1801, and English in 1802. Deciphering the Stone In 1802, a French Orientalist, A.I. Sylvestre de Sacy began to decipher the Demotic text. Equivalents for proper names found in the Greek section were identified in Demotic.

Working at the same time, the Swedish diplomat, J.D. Åkerblad recognized the words: 'temples,' and 'Greeks.' Later in 1814 the Englishman Thomas Young discovered that Demonic words were not always alphabetically written, and closely compared the Hieroglyphic and Demonic scripts. He made many advances, identifying eighty-six signs. He studied the repetition of Greek words and looked for the same number of repeated signs in the Demonic script. In this way he identified the words 'and' as well as 'king,' 'Ptolemy,' and 'Egypt.' He was hampered by the missing parts of the Stone and the fact that the Greek and Demonic sections were not literal translations of one another. He later identified the word 'Ptolemy' in Hieroglyphics and in 1816, he determined that some hieroglyphs were not only word symbols, but at least in some cases were phonetic values. The French scholar Jean François Champollion, working at the same time, reached similar conclusions.

Each worked with the Stone scripts and with other script discoveries, such as an Hieroglyphic inscription found at Karnak and a bilingual inscription on an obelisk discovered at Philae in 1815 to advance understanding of the ancient Egyptian language. In September 1822 Champollion presented his: Lettre À M. Dacier Relative À l'Alphabet Des Hieroglyphes Phonéntiques, which deciphered the hieroglyph forms for many of the Roman Emperors of Egypt. Young was unable to make further progress, but Champollion continued making great strides. He classified many hieroglyphs, formulating a system of grammar and general decipherment. He was greatly aided by his use of Coptic, a language of the Christian descendants of the Egyptians. He is now looked upon as the "Father of the Decipherment of Hieroglyphs." Fate of the Expedition Following the Royal Navy's defeat of the French Fleet at Aboukir Bay on 1 August 1798 (the Battle Of The Nile), the expedition found itself cut off from France and under blockade.

Relations between Paris and Constantinople deteriorated, and news of Nelson's victory may have had a direct affect on the formation of the Second Coalition. Turkey, Naples, Russia and Austria joined Great Britain and Portugal between September 1798 and 1799, all in opposition to France. These events did not immediately affect the expedition, but in the long term, doomed it to failure. French military setbacks in Germany and Italy later provided Bonaparte with a political opportunity to return to Paris and overturn the Directory. When the blockading fleet left Egyptian waters, he sailed for France on August 22 with a select group which included his secretary Bourienne, his stepson Eugène Beauharnais, the generals Berthier, Lannes, Murat, Bessieres, and Marmont as well as the savants Monge, Berthollet and Denon. The capable General Jean-Baptiste Kléber was left in command of the remaining French forces in Egypt with orders to hold out until a peace was concluded.

When he was assassinated on 14 June 1800, Kléber was succeeded by General Jacques-François (Abdallah) Menou, who declared Egypt to be a French territory. Turkish and British forces landed and maneuvered against the French in October 1800. Menou was defeated by Sir Ralph Abercromby in the night battle of Aboukir on 21 March 1801. He retreated and was besieged in Alexandria. When Cairo was threatened, the savants left the capital for the safety of Alexandria, taking their documents, specimens and collected antiquities, among them the Rosetta Stone. Cairo surrendered on 27 June, and the French forces there marched by agreement to Rosetta where they embarked for France. Alexandria held out until the end of August, but capitulated under similar terms as Cairo. The remaining French forces marched to Aboukir and embarked for France on 14 September 1801 ending French ambitions in the Orient. Dispute over Collections General John Hely Hutchinson succeeded Abercromby after the latter's death.

He claimed the savant's collections and several antiquities, including the Rosetta Stone under Article XVI of the treaty of capitulation. The scholars, led by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire refused to surrender their work, and insisted on accompanying their collections to England rather than surrender them. Menou begrudgingly agreed to this, but himself refused to surrender the Stone, claiming it to be his private property. Hutchinson allowed the savants to keep their collections but insisted on the Rosetta Stone, which Menou was forced to relinquish. 'You want it, Monsieur le Général?' he wrote. "You can have it, since you are the stronger of us two...You may pick it up whenever you please." A Colonel Turner came to claim the Stone, which had been stored in a warehouse in Alexandria beside Menou's personal baggage, protected by a double matting and cloth cover. Apparently it was turned over by a French officer in the streets of Alexandria, accompanied by a member of the Institute and witnessed by three British antiquarians including Edward Clarke who recorded the incident. The French officer threatened that the Stone should be removed from the city before the French troops discovered what had happened, and it was taken away under a British military escort.

The Rosetta Stone was shipped to England on HMS l'Égyptienne (a 44-gun vessel captured from the French in Alexandria harbor on 2 Sept 1801), and arrived in Portsmouth on February 1802. It was delivered to The Society of Antiquaries in London where the inscriptions were studied by Oriental and Greek scholars. Four plaster casts were made for the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Trinity College, Dublin. Copies of the Greek text were sent to Universities, Libraries, Academies and Societies throughout Europe. Near the end of 1802, the Stone was transferred to the British Museum in London, where it is still on display for the general public. Andrews, Carol. The Rosetta Stone British Museum Press, London; 1981. Bernard, J.F. Tallyrand: A Biography Putnam's Sons, New York; 1973. Pages 203-204. Chandler, David. The Campaigns of Napoleon Macmillan, New York; 1966. Pages 205-219. Esposito, Vincent J., and Elting, John.

A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars Praeger, New York; 1964. Haythornthwaite, Philip J.Who Was Who In The Napoleonic Wars Arms & Armor Press, London; 1998 Herold, J. Christopher. Bonaparte In Egypt Harper & Row, New York; 1962. Pivka, Otto von. Navies of the Napoleonic Era Hippocrene Books; 1980. Rosetta Stone Rosetta Stone Rosetta Stone Summary What is the Rosetta Stone? The Rosetta Stone, not to be confused with the language learning software, is a fragment of a granite-like rock with a text carved in three different languages. It was found by troops of Napoleon in 1799 in the wall of a fort in the city of Rosetta (Rashid in Arabic), Egypt, which is near Alexandria. It is about 45 inches high. 28.5 inches wide, and 11 inches thick, weighing in at about About ¾ of a ton (1676 pounds - our replica weighs 90-95 pounds).

It is a broken piece of granodiorite stone that was originally part of a 5-6 ft. tall stela, or column, located in a temple elsewhere in the Nile Delta. The stone passed into British hands and was taken to England. It is now housed in the British Museum in London, where it is the most popular attraction in the museum. The writing on the stone is a decree issued jointly by the Pharaoh, Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205-180 BC), and a council of Egyptian priests. The council took place on March 27, 196 BC, the day after the first anniversary of the 14-year-old Pharaoh's coronation. The text itself is referred to as the Decree of Memphis, and has been found in several other locations in Egypt. It cancelled debts and taxes, released prisoners, and granted increased donations to the temples.

The last sentence of the decree reads: "This decree shall be inscribed on a stela of hard stone in sacred (hieroglyphic) and native (Demotic) and Greek characters and set up in each of the first, second and third rank temples beside the image of the ever-living king." Accordingly, our copy of the Rosetta Stone is housed next to a (replica) coin showing the image of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes and a genuine coin which was minted during his reign. More informartion can be found from the British Museum: Brigham Young University-Idaho is the first university in the world to obtain a full-size, 3D replica of the Rosetta Stone from The Freeman Institute. The replica was obtained to help students get a real view at what the stone is like. The replica is 40% resin and 60% granodiorite filler. It also contains a high density foam core to lessen the weight. It is one of the most important pieces to language and culture as it unveiled the Egyptian language and culture to the world. Why is the Rosetta Stone important?

Before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, scholars had not been able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, so very little was understood about the Egyptian culture. The Rosetta Stone has the same text written in three styles/languages: 1) hieroglyphics (top), which can be written in either direction, but in this case they read right to left; 2) Demotic (middle), a cursive form of Egyptian written from right to left; and 3) ancient Greek (bottom), written left to right. Egyptian pharaohs were actually Greek by this date, so Greek was their common tongue. Because scholars could read Greek in 1799, they were able to work out the meaning of the hieroglyphic characters. Thomas Young of England deciphered the demotic script, but young Jean-François Champollion of France, who worked in the library in Grenoble for a time, succeeded in working out the structure of the hieroglyphic characters. He started by finding and deciphering the characters for Ptolemy's name in the Greek and hieroglyphic versions, and published the translation of the full text in 1824.

Decoding hieroglyphic symbols opened up the entire Egyptian culture to the modern world. "More than half of the decree is lost from the hieroglyphic section, originally an estimated 29 lines. The Greek occupies 54 lines, with many errors in the inscription, and the demotic 32, with its last two lines inscribed in a fulsome style to fill the space. The sides taper slightly towards the top. The original shape of the stela is shown in a sign in line 14 of the hieroglyphic text. The stela almost certainly had a rounded top headed by a winged sun-disk, and probably a scene with figures in Egyptian style, similar to that showing the king and queen between two groups of gods on another stela with a copy of the Canopus Decree issued in 238 BC under Ptolemy II." (Parkinson, 26) Michael Coe, noted scholar of Mayan hieroglyphics, called the Rosetta Stone "the most famous piece of rock in the world." (Parkinson, 19) Who found the stone, and when?

It was found in July 1799 by scholars ("savants") sent to Egypt by Napoleon. They were tearing down a ruined wall in Fort Julien in the town of Rosetta when they came across a broken stone with writing in three languages. They looked for other pieces but did not find any. (Giblin, 25) The stone could not have originally been placed in Rosetta, since that town did not even exist during Ptolemy's era. It was built later on sediment from the Nile River. It is probable that the stone was already broken when it was moved to the place where it was discovered. (Parkinson, 26) The stone undoubtedly was housed in a temple elsewhere, perhaps in Sais, which is 40 miles upstream from Rosetta. (Ray, 3) Who translated the hieroglyphics? Working from the Greek text at the bottom of the stone, the British scholar Thomas Young (1773-1829) succeeded in deciphering the demotic text (in the middle of the stone) - a cursive form of Egyptian - in 1814. Young started work on the hieroglyphic text, but then moved on to other projects.

The Frenchman Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) took on the task of puzzling out the hieroglyphic symbols. Champollion had taught himself to read at age 5 and had mastered a dozen languages by the age of 16. He devoted himself to deciphering the hieroglyphic text of the Rosetta Stone, working on the project from 1822 to 1824. The challenge of hieroglyphics lie in the fact that it was unclear whether each symbol represented a letter, a sound, or a concept. Thomas Young Jean-Francois Champollion Scholars had correctly determined that hieroglyphic symbols surrounded by a string or rope, called cartouches, contained the names of royalty. Champollion found cartouches that he thought contained the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra and compared the two. He was able to work out the symbols for the Greek forms of those two names: Ptolemaios and Kleopatra. Once Champollion realized what he had done, he ran out of his apartment and over to the Grenoble library where his brother was working, he shouted "I've got it!

I've got it!," and then promptly fainted. This was the key to deciphering the rest of the Egyptian alphabet and opened the door to understanding an entire civilization that had thrived for several millennia. It is worth noting that the Rosetta Stone was found 6 years before Joseph Smith was born. Also, whereas it took Champollion two years to decipher the 14 lines of hieroglyphic text on the stone, it only took Joseph about 75 days to translate the 588 pages (in the 1st edition Book of Mormon) of "reformed Egyptian" characters on the golden plates with the gift of God and the aid of the Urim and Thummim at about the same time period. Why did BYU-Idaho acquire a replica copy? The McKay Library has been actively collecting materials related to the history of writing for several years. The Rosetta Stone is as important to language and culture as the Mona Lisa painting is to the art world. When we learned that a company had just started making life-size replicas of the stone, we felt this would literally be a keystone to our History of Writing collection.

Pictures can give you a general impression of an object, but we felt it was important to have a full size copy to help students have a much more visual understanding of the context of the Rosetta Stone. Who made this replica? The Freeman Institute in Maryland. See In the 1970's, the British Museum made a few molds of the full face of the authentic Rosetta Stone, and the Freeman Institute owns one of them. The Institute spent 4+ years developing a process to make an exact replica of the mold. A 3D digital image of the Rosetta Stone was made using a laser scanner with an accuracy of 0.0005". A resin mimicking the original coloration of the granodiorite rock of the Rosetta Stone was developed. The replica consists of 40% resin and 60% granodiorite filler. It has a high density foam core to lessen the weight. Where is the city of Rosetta located? In the Nile delta, 8 miles from the Mediterranean and 35 miles northeast of Alexandria. It lies on the left bank of the Rosetta branch of the Nile River.

The Arabic name of the town is Rashid, named after caliph Harun al-Rashid, who founded it in about 800 AD. (Encyclopedia Britannica) (Google Maps) Can you touch the original? The original has been encased in glass since at least 1999. A replica has been placed in the King's Library for people to touch. (Ray, 4) In 1847, the stone was covered with a glass frame to protect the surface. The glass cover was removed in the 1980s because the public complained, but the stone was enclosed in a glass case after its cleaning in 1999. (Parkinson, 25). The stone was also removed from its inclined metal supports and placed upright in 1999. (Parkinson, 27) Why is it broken? It was part of a column, or stela, that was originally about 6 feet tall.

Based on other copies of this same text (the "Memphis Decree") and a similar decree, scholars have reconstructed what they think the original stela may have looked like: (Parkinson, 26) The glyph that looks somewhat like a coffin, near the right side in the last line of hieroglyphics, is the glyph for "column" or "stela." It shows the shape of the original column that the Rosetta Stone came from. What does "hieroglyphics" mean? It comes from two Greek words meaning "sacred writing." It refers to a form of writing in which picture symbols represent ideas and sounds. ( ) Are there any other copies of the text? Several other copies of the Memphis Decree have been discovered. In 1898, a limestone stela inscribed with a copy of just the hieroglyphic version of the Decree of Memphis was found at Nubayrah, or el-Nobaira near Damnhur in Lower Egypt. The stela is rounded at the top and is 4 ft. 2 in. high and 1 ft. 8 in. wide and is now in the Cairo Museum.

It was carved 14 years after the Rosetta Stone, in 183 BC. (Budge, 103; Parkinson, 30) A further version of the hieroglyphic version of the Memphis Decree was found in 1848, incised on the walls of the Birth House of the temple of Isis on the island of Philae. (Giblin, 73; Andrews, 13) Several sandstone fragments containing the text were found in Elephantine and are now in the Louvre. A poorly preserved basalt stela containing the text from Nub Taha is now in Alexandria. (Parkinson, 30) History of Ptolemy V "In the summer of 204 BC Ptolemy IV died suddenly in his mid-thirties, and Ptolemy V came to the throne as a six-year-old child. In the courtly intrigues that followed, Ptolemy IV's death was concealed until the boy-king's mother Arsinoe had been killed. This weakened the government severely." Hostilities against Egypt continued until 200 or 198 BC.

Rebels were eventually defeated and "they were punished as part of the coronation of the by now thirteen-year-old king, eight years into his reign." The coronation was held in the traditional capitol of Memphis. "A decree was issued to record the priests' granting of a royal cult to the king in return for his favours to them, including exemption from taxes, and is known after its place of issue as the Memphis Decree." (Parkinson, 29) Bibliography: British Museum - The Rosetta Stone The Rosetta Stone The Rosetta Stone Description Part of grey and pink granodiorite stela bearing priestly decree concerning Ptolemy V in three blocks of text: Hieroglyphic (14 lines), Demotic (32 lines) and Greek (54 lines). Culture/period (Africa,Egypt,Lower Egypt,Nile Delta,El-Rashid,Fort Saint Julien) Materials hieroglyphic Inscription Comment The inscription is a decree passed by a council of priests, one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13 year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation.

Inscription Type From Fort St Julien, el-Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt Ptolemaic Period, 196 BC The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests, one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. In previous years the family of the Ptolemies had lost control of certain parts of the country. It had taken their armies some time to put down opposition in the Delta, and parts of southern Upper Egypt, particularly Thebes, were not yet back under the government's control. Before the Ptolemaic era (that is before about 332 BC), decrees in hieroglyphs such as this were usually set up by the king. It shows how much things had changed from Pharaonic times that the priests, the only people who had kept the knowledge of writing hieroglyphs, were now issuing such decrees. The list of good deeds done by the king for the temples hints at the way in which the support of the priests was ensured.

The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture. Soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta).

On Napoleon's defeat, the stone became the property of the English under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had found. The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802, with only one break. Towards the end of the First World War, in 1917, when the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London, they moved it to safety along with other, portable, 'important' objects. The Rosetta Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway fifty feet below the ground at Holborn. BM OP 60, p.73,83

Question: Where in London can you find the 'Rosetta Stone'?
Answer: The British Museum